Me: Why should we lie just to spare someone’s feelings?
and that too for someone we don’t like?
especially when it’s wrong to lie?
Him: Yea, it makes life easy :p
My Husband’s Wisdom August 6, 2009
Insomnia July 31, 2009
I just can’t seem to fall asleep. I’ve done everything I could to put myself to sleep. Had a big dinner, cleaned the kitchen, watched Friends on youtube, commented on random pictures on Orkut… Everything!
I’m back into one of my countdown modes again. This time, I’m counting down till I move out of Evansville and move back to be with my husband. Afer a year and a half of being married, the next few months will be the first time we actually get to live together for longer than ten days.
The distance seems to be taking a toll on me at last. Not to mention the constant moving. I seem to be living in a time of constant, accelerated, change that started the moment I quit my first job in September 07. Since then, I’ve been engaged, married, shuttled between my parents’ home and my in-laws’, quit my second job, moved to the US, moved to school and moved again for my internship. Throw in a bit of disorientation from the worst winter anyone remembered, a roommate from hell, a year’s worth of medication and you’ll get somewhat close to what’s been happening in my life. Of course, before that, there was the idiot God sent to make me value my freedom who destroyed all peace and quiet in the process.
In the midst of this all, I’ve managed to write a couple of hundred blogposts, keep my friends, do well at work in India and at my internship, keep up my grades, sing in public again, not grow too fat (despite the medication), learn a bit of kickboxing, work 12 hours a week, build our marriage, built my habit of daily puja, make a few new friends, earn a drivers’ license and other bla bla bla bla life-in-the-US related stuff and also make killer dal makhani.
I’ve also been able to visit Chicago, New Jersey, Indianapolis, St Louis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, San Diego and the Smoky Mountains. Not to mention live in South Bend, Bloomington and Evansville.
There’s more change coming up. We’re going to relocate soon. And I’m going to move into a phase that I’ve never encountered so far (knock on wood). It’s called unemployment and limited income. Well, I’ve been on the second for a year now, so that’s different.
I have no clue how I’m going to survive the next few months and what I’m going to do if I don’t find a job. As each day passes by, the chasm between my life in India before my parents decided to “settle” my life (ha! the settle part is a joke, if I’ve heard one) and the life I live now seems to widen. I seem to be experiencing a range of umm… experiences that no one else around me seems to have. Some have the finances and relationship part, others have the marriage and studies part, yet others have the gave-up-my-job-and-am-quite-broke-part. But not marriage, long distance, almost-broke and studying all at once.
Now, this seems to be a good time to insert a disclaimer that I don’t think I have troubles, I just need a good rant. But then again, I only care for the people who understand that, so…
Where am I headed with this post? Is that the question you just asked? Nowhere.
I’m just playing out the choices I made out loud. Some are choices, others are defaults, yet others are the natural progression of things.
So… It almost seems ok that I’ve not been my “usual self”. It’s been so long since I’ve been my usual self that I don’t even remember what she was like anymore.
Someday, I hope to have the time to get to know my “new self”.And I hope that is before I change again…
You Can’t Have It All… At Once… July 9, 2009
Today, I heard some of the most powerful words I have in a long time.
You can’t have it all, at the same time.
We spend so much of our time and energy chasing it all. The best grades I can get, the best our marriage can ever be, the best I’ve ever looked, the most time I’ve ever spent with God, the best friendships I can ever imagine. And of course, there’s money, there’s clothes, there’s diamonds, there’s so much!
So much time goes by trying to balance it all. Yearning for what we cannot have, wishing for more hours in the day, missing the friends we cannot find the time to talk to, feeling guilty for not working on something that makes a difference… So much of life goes by because we not only spend the energy we have on things that need to be done, we also spend it worrying about other things we wish we could do. And at the end, we seem to be left with nothing.
Where does the time go? Do we not know how to prioritize? Are we selfish? Lazy? Stupid? Unable to run our own lives? The supermoms and the Oprah’s would definitely want us to believe that.
Over the last few months, I’ve started to believe that. I’ve started to worry that I’m not as “balanced” as I should be. That maybe, just maybe, I’m doing something wrong. There’s the flab around my tummy I haven’t been able to get rid of. There’s the dull skin and the unopened tubes of face pack. There’s the unused chapati dough in the fridge because I’ve been too lazy to make rotis. The clothes lay unironed and scattered int he closet. There are movies that lie unwatched. Books that lie unread. I haven’t sung, really sung, in years. I haven’t learned to play the keyboard yet despite owning one for a year… The list is endless…
But today, for the first time, I felt free.
For the first time in months, I’ve allowed myself to listen to the voice inside me that has been saying the same thing. The friends who have been telling me I don’t give myself enough credit. At last! I don’t get the feeling I should be doing something else. I’m just happy to be in the moment I’m in.
